Monday, April 4, 2016

Recare is the lifeblood of your practice

If you are a general practice or pediatric dental practice,
your recare system is the lifeblood of your practice. Your doctor’s schedule
feeds off the hygiene patients so it is critical that you have a seamless
system. But are your hygiene systems working as well as you think they are? You
may have patients falling through the cracks or not receiving the reminders
that you think they are.

The most important component of your recare system is the
setup and making sure your team understands the details. I want to take some
time today to walk you through proper setup, checking your individual patients
continuing care, and which report to manage.

First, the setup is key. I wrote a blog post on May 23, 2012,
called “KISS your Continuing Care Types,” but obviously not everyone read it so
I am going to take some of those tips and re-apply them today. Many offices,
understandably, try and create a system for 3-month Perio, 4-month Prophy, etc.,
by setting up new Continuing Care types but trust me . . . IT DOESN’T WORK! Remember
that you can only attach one Continuing Care type to the procedure code. To

understand what I am talking about, go to the Office Manager > Maintenance
> Practice Setup > Procedure Code Setup, then highlight the D1110 and
click edit. You will notice in the middle of the window there is a >>
Auto Continuing Care where you can attach one Continuing Care Type to this
code. This means you cannot link up a 4-month Prophy and 6-month Prophy to the
same code.

Your options are Prophy and Perio or Recare. You can link
the Prophy to the D1110 and the D1120 and the Perio to the D4910, or link the
Recare to all three.

After you have this setup corrected, when you schedule your
patient for a cleaning, it will link up to the appointment correctly. When you
set complete, it will update your patient’s due date.

But what if your patient is a 3-month Perio or 4-month
Prophy? How do you get it up update the due date correctly? You can update the
patient’s frequency on his or her Family File in the Continuing Care window. Once
you change the patient’s recare frequency, then your reports will be accurate.
When you schedule the patient for his or her next visit, the system will know
when he or she is due.

After you get this setup fixed and the patient’s frequency
updated on the Family File, then you can feel confident that your Continuing
Care Report is accurate. If you are using the Dentrix eCentral communication
manager, you will know that your patients are receiving reminders when they are
due. For a full article on the Continuing Care report, CLICK HERE.

Dayna Johnson, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Dayna loves her work. She has over 25 years of experience in the dental industry, and she’s passionate about building efficient, consistent, and secure practice management systems. Dayna knows that your entire day revolves around your practice management software—the better you learn to use it, the more productive and stress-free your office will be. In 2016, Dayna founded Novonee ™, The Premier Dentrix Community, to help cultivate Dentrix super-users all over the country. Learn more from Dayna at www.novonee.com and contact Dayna at dayna@novonee.com.

4 comments:

I temp a lot & call patients who are in the Unscheduled List with that said where do I put the notes fir example if a patient says don't call me until July 2016 ? I put notes in the Office Journal & Insert Dateline when a patient cancels & does not reschedule. However recently I called a patient & he said he had been called 5 times in the last 2 weeks ?

Hello, I am a practicing dentist and enjoy reading your blog. We have the dentrix system but I was wondering if you had blogged about looking patients up by demographic (ie, seeing the total number of pediatric patients that come to the office). Or finding out how much is financially produced by certain demographics. If so, I would love to read it, or if you have any direction on dentrix capabilities in regards to this. Thankyou